The F word

Everyone fails! I don’t care if you are a college student, the CEO of a fortune 500 company or a professor at Oxford. One thing we all have in common is that we have either tasted the bitterness of failure or we should expect it to arrive sooner or later.

Am I a pessimist, a realist or just some random twat? I’m actually an optimist (okay maybe a bit of a twat) but maybe that’s the reason I appreciate the necessity of failure.

I spent my whole childhood running away from the possibility of failure. I remember my dad getting me to repeat my times tables over and over again until I could sing them like my ABCs. If I got them wrong, well boy……

I remember signing up to play for Docklands Youth FC and telling the coach I was a goalkeeper because I didn’t have the bottle to screw up a pass, miss a tackle or better yet; take one of my infamous bent shots.

Those experiences and more, formed a childhood where failure was avoided at all costs and when I did take a dodgy shot, it stuck with me for a long time (I can still remember some horrific shots).

Looking back on it though, I wish someone would have told me that failing isn’t as bad as it was cracked up to be. That we all experience it at one multiple points in life and it’s ultimately life saying “this method doesn’t work, try another”.

Okay it’s not always a pleasant experience, in fact it almost never is but the sooner you’re able to learn and apply; the sooner you are likely to experience success.

I don’t know about you but this is something that wasn’t passed on to me as a young person and I think it’s a bit unfair, seeing as my parents, teachers and the rest of them (whom may I add have experienced failure) expected nothing less than perfection from me!